Gabriela Salvador Riera graduated from the program in June 2024 and was a vocal and strings major at Cab Calloway School of the Arts in Wilmington. She was the winner of the 2024 Jack Kent Cooke Young Artist Award & From the Top’s Learning and Media Lab Fellowship, 2nd place laureate of the national 2023 Sphinx Competition - Junior Division, and concertmaster of the Philadelphia Youth Orchestra. Gabriela has been a PMAY (Philadelphia Music Alliance for Youth) Artist since 2020.

Gabriela began playing violin at age six and studied with Julianne Murphy-Ruiz at the Music School of DE from 2015-2022, where she graduated from the Suzuki Academy with High Honors. She continued her studies with Shelley Beard at the Settlement Music School in Philadelphia, where she also played in the Advanced-Study Newman String Quartet coached by William Polk of the Philadelphia Orchestra and competed the Fischoff Competition.

In 2021, Gabriela was selected for the inaugural national cohort of Fortissima, an artistic and leadership development program for young women in classical music at the Colburn School in LA. She was also selected for the Chicago-Youth-in-Music Festival where she played side-by-side with the Chicago Symphony under the baton of Riccardo Muti.

In 2022, Gabriela participated in a six-week intensive at Heifetz International Music Institute. That year, Gabriela was awarded the Bruce Montgomery Foundation Springboard Grant and was named high-school winner of the Coastal Concerts Competition. Additionally, Gabriela won the 2022 Delaware Concerto Competition for Young Musicians as well as the high school division of the 2022 Betsy L. Kent Newark Symphony Concerto Competition, soloing with Wilmington Community and Newark Symphony Orchestras, respectively.

Gabriela was selected to perform at the McDuffie Center for Strings Labor Day festival. Earlier that same summer, Gabriela participated in Encore Chamber Music Summer Academy, as well as intensives at Juilliard and Cleveland Institute of Music with the Sphinx Performance Academy. She was also an alum of the Sphinx Performance Academy at the Curtis Institute, and two-year recipient of the SPA X-Factor Award.

At Cab, Gabriela was a soprano in the high-school Vocal program, member of the 2023 Delaware All-State Treble Choir, a member of National Honor Society, 1st violin in the Cab Calloway Honors quartet, concertmaster of the select high school Chamber Orchestra, and Assistant Music Director and violinist in Cab’smusical productions of Hairspray and The Prom.

Gabriela was equally busy in 2024. She made her professional solo debut with the Buffalo and Erie Philharmonic, was the associate concertmaster of the National Youth Orchestra on their tour to South America and is currently attending Oberlin College and Conservatory, majoring in Violin performance on a full scholarship in the fall of 2024.